It is currently known to provide various interactive responses through a telephony network for a variety of reasons.
Market surveys for all manner of services or goods are traditionally conducted in ways that have weakness'.
For greater depth a market surveyor will phone the target person some time after the call has been made and request feedback. Such an approach to collecting and using survey information has a number of difficulties. A first is simply getting the same person back sometime afterward presumes that the number is available and that the person is still available at the number. Further, market surveys are reliant upon people who are willing to spend some time responding. For people who might have little time, it is a further imposition to be called some time later at a time that may be inconvenient for no advantage whatsoever to the called person.
Further, when a person is phoned several weeks after the event and is asked to recall impressions and specifics it is difficult to obtain reliable and accurate responses. This is especially the case where there is an emotional response which may be important to the called person at the time of the event but is forgotten at the time of the follow-up enquiry except they may then have a negative attitude to the product or service but do not know why or even care they have that attitude. Current practices have a lack of accuracy.
Telephony networks in particular, can be very large indeed and have a variety of services including automatic responses for those wishing to use the services provided by or through a network and there are problems with their acceptance by callers so it is useful to be able to accurately survey their use as well.
The problem to which this invention relates to difficulties in assessing what is an effective approach in connection with provision of such survey services, identifying when there might be a problem or an improvement that might assist both in providing a better service or reducing costs or complexity or obtaining a better understanding of client interactions.
An object of this invention is to improve the results that might be obtained or at least provide a useful alternative.